Q&A: Michael Massing on Media Coverage of the Surge and What Iraqis Really Think
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Olmert & Israel: The Change
By Amos Elon
Israel under Ehud Olmert is not what it was under Ariel Sharon, at least in tone. Sharon was a soldier who spent much of his life fighting the Arabs. Olmert is a suave corporate lawyer, a deal maker, a political operator. Sharon supported the "Greater Israel" movement. Olmert's idea of Israel is not the replay of a biblical vision but a secular modern state with a booming economy, integrated into global commerce and closely linked to Europe. This does not mesh well with what God and Abraham discussed in the Bronze Age.
A Movie That Matters
By Anne Applebaum
On the Oscar-nominated film Katyn, directed by Andrzej Wajda.
Will to Live
By Diane Johnson and John F. Murray
Few of us lose a parent without regret and some self-reproach, some sense of things undone or injustices unredressed; it is a natural component of grief. The literature of memoirs by children of their parents may be affectionate, angry, or ambivalent, but such works inevitably contain conscious or unconscious expressions of the reservations and differences essential in a parent–child relation if the child isn't to be submerged in the parent's tremendous identity. David Rieff's memoir of his mother, Susan Sontag, has all of these qualities, which perhaps accounts for its power beyond mere eulogy, elegy, or complaint.
The Born Rebel Artist
By John Golding
On Gustave Courbet, an exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France.
Blogs
By Sarah Boxer
On We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture by John Rodzvilla, and nine other books.
The 'Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe
By Tony Judt
On the Democrats
By Frank Rich
Plus: Claire Messud on William Trevor, Alan Hollinghurst on Henry James, Pankaj Mishra on Burma, Richard Lewontin on Stephen Jay Gould, James McPherson on the Civil War, and more.
